Read Online Cold Fire by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online

were God's avatar into whom flowed a direct current of the Almighty's apocalyptic wrath.
    He turned to the closed door.
    The bedroom lay beyond.
    The mother and child had to be in there.
    Lisa … Susie …
    But who else?
    Sociopathic killers usually operated alone, but sometimes they paired up as these two had done. Larger alliances, however, were rare. Charles Manson and his “family,” of course. There were other examples. He couldn't rule anything out, not in a world where the trendiest professors of philosophy taught that ethics were always situational and that everyone's point of view was equally right and valuable, regardless of its logic or hate quotient.
    It was a world that bred monsters, and this beast might be hydra-headed.
    He knew caution was called for, but the exhilarating righteous wrath that filled him also gave him a sense of invulnerability. He stepped to the bedroom door, kicked it open, and shouldered through, knowing he might be gut-shot, not giving a damn, shotgun in front of him, ready to kill and be killed.
    The woman and child were alone. On the filthy bed. Bound at wrists and ankles with sturdy strapping tape. Tape across their mouths.
    The woman, Lisa, was about thirty, slim, an unusually attractive blonde. But the daughter, Susie, was remarkably more beautiful than her mother, ethereally beautiful: about ten years old, with luminous green eyes, delicate features, and skin as flawless as the membranous interior surface of an eggshell. The girl seemed, to Jim, to be an embodiment of innocence, goodness, and purity—an angel cast down into a cesspool. New power informed his rage at the sight of her bound and gagged in the bedroom's squalor.
    Tears streamed down the child's face, and she choked on muffled sobs of terror behind the tape that sealed her lips. The mother was not crying, though grief and fear haunted her eyes. Her sense of responsibility to her daughter—and a visible rage not unlike Jim's—seemed to keep her from falling over the brink of hysteria.
    He realized they were afraid of him. As far as they knew, he was in league with the men who had abducted them.
    As he propped the shotgun against the built-in dresser, he said, “It's all right. It's over now. I killed them. I killed them both.”
    The mother stared at him wide-eyed, disbelieving.
    He didn't blame her for doubting him. His voice sounded strange: full of fury, cracking on every third or fourth word, tremulous, going from a whisper to a hard bark to a whisper again.
    He looked around for something with which to cut them free. A roll of the strapping tape and a pair of scissors lay on the dresser.
    Grabbing the scissors, he noticed X-rated videotapes also stacked on the dresser. Suddenly he realized that the walls and ceiling of the small room were papered with obscene photographs torn from the pages of sex magazines, and with a jolt he saw it was filth with a twisted difference: child pornography. There were grown men in the photos, their faces always concealed, but there were no grown women, only young girls and boys, most of them as young as Susie, many of them younger, being brutalized in every way imaginable.
    The men he had killed would have used the mother only briefly, would have raped and tortured and broken her only as an example to the child. Then they would have cut her throat or blown her brains out on some desolate dirt road out in the desert, leaving her body for the delectation of lizards and ants and vultures. It was the child they really wanted, and for whom they would have made the next few months or years a living hell.
    His anger metastasized into something beyond mere rage, far beyond wrath. A terrible darkness rose inside of him like black crude oil gushing up from a wellhead.
    He was furious that the child had seen those photographs, had been forced to lie in those stained and foul-smelling bedclothes with unspeakable obscenity on every side of her. He had the crazy urge to pick up the shotgun and